THE people who made a hippie dream come true do not look the part. Instead of tie-dye T-shirts, the campaigners who masterminded the legalisation of recreational marijuana use in Colorado wore dark suits and ties to celebrate the world’s first legal retail pot sales.

Instead of talking about the counter-culture, they spoke of regulations, taxes and corporate responsibility. They looked sober, successful — mainstream.

With Washington state poised to follow Colorado later this year, and activists in a dozen other states preparing to fight for legalisation, a once-illicit plant is now a legitimate industry with advocates, interest groups and lobbyists.

The Marijuana Policy Project (MPP), the Medical Marijuana Industry Group (MMIG) and the National Cannabis Industry Association (NCIA) are just some of the groups now vying to shape public opinion and government policy.

For the likes of Diane Goldstein, a former lieutenant commander with the Los Angeles police who became an activist for the group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (Leap), the groundswell of support for legalisation is welcome evidence that society has turned against the drug war. “It’s no longer dangerous for people to have a rational view about a failed policy,” she says.

But for Dr Kevin Sabet of the group Smart Approaches to Marijuana, which opposes legalisation, the celebratory scenes in Denver pot shops last week is proof that a Big Tobacco-style campaign of manipulation has prevailed.

Many Americans, he says, are unaware that cannabis can cause long-term damage to people’s health, especially to the young, and that the American Medical Association opposes legalisation. “It’s Big Tobacco redux,” says Sabet, who also directs the drug policy institute at the University of Florida’s department of psychiatry.

What was a fringe movement four decades ago had evolved into a slick, well-funded network based in Washington DC, he says. “It was, ‘We need to cut our ponytails, take off our tie-dye shirts, put on our Macy’s suits, go to Congress and start lobbying state legislators.’”

And, Sabet argues, the industry has been mimicking the tobacco playbook in portraying its product as virtually harmless while using chemistry and marketing to turn consumers into addicts.

According to Sabet, the cannabis industry comprises a vast coalition of lobbyists, billionaire sponsors like George Soros and the late Peter Lewis, and profit-seeking investors like Privateer Holdings and the ArcView Group.

An estimated $1.43bn worth of legal marijuana was sold for medicinal purposes in 2013, and that figure is likely to increase exponentially with the advent of legal recreational cannabis.

There is no doubt the legalisation industry has come a long way since Keith Stroup founded the National Organisation for the Reform of Marijuana Laws in 1970 with $5,000 from the Playboy Foundation.

Activists say smartening up their act was a natural step. A few years ago, Mason Tvert wore scruffy T-shirts while urging Colorado college students to back legalisation. After winning that fight with a ballot initiative in Nov 2012, he became the MPP’s communications director and moved to a smart, well-staffed office near the domed state capital in Denver. “Yeah, I wear a suit these days,” he says, smiling.

More important, Tvert continues, was the campaign’s focus on a core message: cannabis is safer than alcohol.

Buttonholing legislators and policymakers was crucial, says Michael Elliott, executive director of the Denver-based MMIG. “We’re lobbying for regulation and taxation. That’s why we’re beside the state capitol. We’re down there every week.

”Tvert and Elliott attribute the momentum behind legalisation to public recognition that prohibition has been a fiasco that has led to needless imprisonments and fiscal waste. And pro-legalisation forces still have only meagre resources and could barely be said to have lobbyists, according to Goldstein. Leap’s speakers, she adds, are not paid.

Prof Mark Kleiman, drug legalisation expert at UCLA, says the marijuana industry is not a united one with shared interests, and should not be viewed as a single lobbying force.

Many of those who have licenses to grow and sell medicinal marijuana, for instance, stand to lose heavily from legalising recreational use because it would expand competition and depress prices, he says. Colorado’s medicinal sector obtained exclusive rights to sell recreational cannabis for nine months, a temporary shield, but medicinal growers in Washington state fear disaster.

In contrast to profit-driven industry lobby groups, says Kleiman, marijuana’s legalisation efforts so far have been led by advocacy groups and funders like Soros who have stood to make little or no financial gain. “These are not mostly people who are making a living from cannabis and are, therefore, lobbying for laws in their industrial interests.”

That would likely change, he says, with more legalisation and money. “The marijuana lobby is going from being purely ideological to being industrial.”

Could some of today’s tokers become tomorrow’s industry spin doctors? “Ten years from now will there be an evil marijuana lobby devoted entirely to preventing any effective regulation or taxation? Absolutely. But that’s not the reality at the moment,” says Kleiman.

—By arrangement with the Guardian